Public Accounts Committee: government IT is 'dysfunctional, damaging and sometimes dangerous'
Not much to show for £20 billion a year, says hard-hitting report into IT failures
The UK Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has released a highly critical report concerning technology implementation within government, calling it "dysfunctional, damaging and sometimes dangerous".
The Committee, which examines the value for money of Government services and programmes, cites "concerns on the number of complex, large-scale digital programmes that we continue to see fail with serious impact on "important government services and taxpayers' money".
The PAC report Challenges in implementing digital change singles out failures in NHS England's IT plan to improve primary services and the Home Office's much-delayed and massively over budget programme to replace the police national computer for criticism, but says that many large scale government IT projects continue to fail.
The reason for these failures are depressingly familiar: a dearth of digital know-how and understanding among government's senior non-specialist leadership; embedded legacy systems stymieing the drive to digitise services; a lack of requisite management structures; a continued overdependence on outsourcing; and a scarcity of the required skills in both public and private sectors.
While the report acknowledges there have been some successes, such as the rollout of the pandemic furlough scheme, these are mainly short-term projects rather than the large scale, long term, transformational digital change projects which cost the country £20 billion per year.
Responsibility for improving government's digital performance lies with the Central Digital and newly-created Data Office (CDDO) and the Government Digital Service (GDS), both part of the Cabinet Office. These organisations have their work cut out, the report notes.
As well as a lack of skills and understanding and an overreliance on outsourcing, there is "no clear plan to replace or modernise legacy systems and data" that underpin key services and which are expensive to maintain and incompatible with modern digital technologies.
There is a failure by government departments to understand the difference between patching up existing systems and true technology led transformation, "meaning that they have missed opportunities to move to modern, efficient ways of working".
There are structural, leadership and management problems, such as failing to have a dedicated programme office to align efforts across the lifetime of the programme and to integrate legacy and future technologies,
PAC chair Dame Meg Hillier MP said: "The short-termism that plagues so much critical policy delivery is nowhere more evident than in Government's staggering efforts to bring crucial, national IT systems into the current century and up to functional speed. The merry-go-round of Ministers and Permanent Secretaries means no one remains long enough to see through major, essential major digital change programmes.
Instead we hobble on with dysfunctional, damaging and sometimes dangerous systems that devour precious resources but aren't protecting our borders, aren't helping emergency services save lives, don't support our national defence or the personnel who risk their lives in service of it and don't help catch the people falling through the gaping holes in our welfare safety net. Nation, citizen and taxpayer deserve much better than this, and we'll continue to challenge departments in front of us until they get it."